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Online Apple ProRes Proxy from 5D .movs
Hey Everyone,
I’m working on a feature documentary that has over 300 hours of footage from the Canon 5D Mark II. To keep everything on only a few hard drives and to make life easy for the Offline Editor, the footage was converted to Apple ProRes (Proxy) in Compressor. Unfortunately, the filmmaker didn’t foresee the issues with creating an online version of the film and only grabbed the .movs from the camera cards, losing the file structure for Log & Transfer. Now that we’re starting to online the film, I can’t use L&T to get the files to Apple ProRes (HQ). Even if I media manage the project, it looks like I just have a list of all the files that I’ll need to reconvert in Compressor. Does anyone know if I can media manage the project and get this thing online without converted the source .movs in their entirety? The goal is to save time and money and not send it to an Online House to do it.
Thanks!
Holly -
10 Replies
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You would have to Match all files by hand, then transcode to ProResHQ, then match the edit back by hand.
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I was afraid of that answer. So you don’t think that creating an offline, media managed project would help?
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NO reel number, no unique timecode… Media Manager won’t come into play here.
Nope…serious hard work ahead.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Holly Buechel] “I was afraid of that answer.”
Yeah, kind of a bummer. The original card structure wasn’t backed up, but they were logged and transfrred the first time?
[Holly Buechel] “So you don’t think that creating an offline, media managed project would help?”
Were the ProRes Proxies logged and transferred?
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No, they didn’t use Log & Transfer. They used MPEG Streamclip and batch converted all the files from the 5D to APR Proxy. I prefer Compressor but maybe MPEG Streamclip would be faster?
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[Holly Buechel] “I prefer Compressor”
Me too. If you have an 8Core machine and setup a “quick cluster” Compressor should be way faster than MPEG Streamclip.
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Maybee i’m missing something here but i think you’re only option is:
1.Create a list of all the clip names/numbers that are used in the final edit and put these files in one folder.
Convert those files from H264 to ProRes 422 or HQ in compressor.
Borrow your friends macs for one day 😛Compressor on an 8 or 12 core is your friend in Cluster mode-> system preferences -> Qmaster)
When finished.
Create copy of your sequence
Make proxy files offline.
Reconnect with the new 422/HQ files
Copy/paste edit in new ProRes 422/HQ 1920×1080 timeline
Remove attributes Scaling/distort. -
Sounds like a good plan. I haven’t used clusters before but I guess it’s a good time to learn. Now I just have to wrangle up those friends. 🙂
Thanks everyone! -
Yeah, the problem lies wherebyhe proxy file names won’t match the original h264s.
It’s going to take a lot of eyeball work!
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Hi Holly,
While all these solutions would work, I would rather not have to eyeball anything (especially because I do a lot of repos).
Here’s what I did.
1. Download “A Better Finer Rename v8”. The program will rename files for you.
$20 for full version2. Drag all the original media in to the program and select:
Category: Text > Action: Add text to end > [type -Apple ProRes 422 (Proxy) or whatever your end tag to all the files in your current sequence are named.
3. Reconnect your timeline to the renamed H.264 media and then use media manager to convert to Pro Res 422.
No eyeball, no recompress, no headache. Very simple. I find that Log & Transfer ins’t always stable and will not always pull in all the media completely so I use compressor as well.
Hope it helps in the future!
-T
NOTE: FCP may crash while reconnecting as it does not like the H.264 codec. Be sure to do small sections at a time and save once reconnected.
Film/Commercial Editor
New York City
FCP 7/Avid 5
Mac OSX 10.6.5
Blackmagic HD Extreme 7.9.3
2x Quad-Core Intel Xeon
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